This week: Sissy Böttcher

Sissy Böttcher is from Germany and is doing her first year of the Master’s program Operations, Management and Logistics. She works at Studyportals.eu ten hours a week and is a volunteer at the Common Room in the Bunker. “For me it is not the most important thing to finish my studies within two years. I’ve already been studying for five years and in some semesters of my study I did nothing but study. I decided to change this during the final two years of my studies. During your days as a student there are so many other things to discover apart from studying. While I do want to do my study well, I also want to have a rich social life and meet new people. I don’t mind so much now if I have to catch up on a subject later. This semester, for example, I am only following five subjects.”

At the Common Room she is one of the active volunteers. “We regularly organize activities, and I enjoy contributing something to them. Within the Common Room there are a great many opportunities to come up with initiatives and organize things. For one, in February there was a performance by two musicians that I organized. We didn’t have to pay them for this and they slept at my place. It was a very successful concert that attracted many visitors, but somebody has to organize it. If nobody takes any initiative, nothing happens. In October I want to organize a similar event, which will probably be a blues concert.”

New in the Common Room are the ‘Dutch chat evenings’. Just before the Dutch examination took place, I thought it might be a good idea to have an exercise night, starring both Dutch and foreign students. In order to speak Dutch together and be corrected by ‘native speakers’. We have now had a number of these nights, and we shall probably keep organizing them, even if there are no exams coming up. Everybody was very enthusiastic about the initiative and there was enough interest. Again: if somebody doesn’t organize it, nothing will happen.”

For people who would like to do something, but don’t know how to combine it, Sissy has a tip: “If you think you would like to do volunteer work, but you anticipate too many problems, just try it. You don’t know how much time or energy it will take until you’ve tried it. Maybe it isn’t all that bad after all! You are not tied down to it, so if you don’t like it you can always stop again, but at least you will have tried.” (HB)